The Old Neighborhood

In The Old Neighborhood David Mamet confirms his stature as a master of the American stage a writer who can turn the most innocuous phrase into a lit fuse and a family reunion into a perfectly orchestrated firestorm of sympathy yearning and blistering authentic rage.               In these three short plays a middle-aged Bobby Gould returns to the old-neighborhood in a series of encounters with his past that however briefly open windows on his present. In The Disappearance of the Jews Bobby and an old buddy fantasize about finding themselves in a nostalgic shtetl paradise while revealing how lost they are in their own families. In the comfort of her kitchen Bobbys sister Jolly unscrolls a list of childhood grievances that is at nice painful and hilarious. And the old girlfriend in Deeny faced with a man she once loved finds herself obsessively free-associating on gardening sex and subatomic particles. Swerving from comedy to terror from tenderness to anguish—with a swiftness that unsettles even as it strikes home—The Old Neighborhood is classic Mamet.